Personalized Gifts – Placemats From Storybook Pages

Today is the last day in the Natural Holiday Blog Carnival…..I know you’re as sad as I am. Today we are all covering homemade gift ideas and gift inspirations…..and I might get ousted from the group. This is NOT natural. It includes laminate, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t around in the Garden of Eden. It also includes a laminating machine…..ditto on the Eden thing. Oh, and a printer. Gosh…..I’m just not with it this week, am I?  But, I saw this idea online and I HAD to do it – had to. I didn’t have any choice. By now you know I’m a total bookworm. If I see ideas for gifts that involve books, I’m all over it – especially if it’s a way to recycle something that otherwise wouldn’t get any use. That’s natural – right? Recycling. Yep. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

I saw the idea for these placemats from Real Simple magazine. I’ve seen a few other bloggers link to the article, but no one did a tutorial (and if they did, please don’t burst my bubble). To make these awesome placemats, you need some childrens’ books – these were old books, some with pages missing, pages ripped and one with the back torn off.  If you don’t have books like this at home, they would be easy to find at the thrift store – or you could ask on Freecycle. If you plan on doing this entirely yourself, you’ll also need laminating sheets, a laminating machine and 11×17 paper. Yep, I realize that my list is as clear as mud – but we’ll get to that in a minute.

First you need to select the two pages that you want on your placemat. This was the fun part for me. I thought and thought about this. I picked and then I re-picked. After you decide on your pages, cut them out using a knife like this or an xacto knife – use caution because those puppies are SHARP and you might draw blood. Or so I hear from OTHER PEOPLE. *Cough* Make sure to cut right down the binding so that you don’t lose any of your picture.

Here is an example of the ones I cut out – they face each other like so….so you want to make sure the sentences match. Don’t choose page 1 and then page 10. That doesn’t make any sense and will just confuse children everywhere…..and confuse Stacy.

Now, here is the technical part that you can leave out. It just so happens that my amazing husband ROCKS Photoshop. So, he created templates for me with each child’s name. You don’t have to do this unless you have access to Photoshop or a similar program.  As you saw on the Real Simple site, they didn’t even use paper behind them. They just laminated two book pages together. …and it looks cute that way. This is just an extra if you want to add it.

When you have your pages cut out and your paper ready to go, measure the pages and the paper to center them accordingly. I let Barry do this part because as we’ve already learned, I am the Queen of Crooked.

When you’ve got them just right, you will want to glue them down just a bit. Not a whole lot of glue, just enough to insure that they’re not going to move around after you’ve placed them. A big wind could come along and blow them off. Or Stacy might accidentally slip her hand. Or Stacy might sneeze and jerk her hand sideways. You never know what might happen. Glue is just a precautionary measure if you live near big winds.

Now comes the fun part….laminating! Woohoo! Surely I’m not the only one who is excited……right? This machine was borrowed. We purchased the laminating sheets from Office Depot. They are $20 for 15 sheets, which is very reasonable for a gift.  If you don’t have a laminating machine (and really, who does?) then you could see if any scrapbooking friends have one. You could also check with your church and your school to see if you’re able to borrow a machine. If that comes up empty, then Office Depot will laminate an 11×17 sheet for $2.99(that includes the laminating sheet, so you would just have to take your book pages and/or paper with book pages glued on it to them). Again, very reasonable for a gift – especially a personalized gift.I had so much fun doing this. I wanted to laminate my whole house. Good thing I don’t have one of those machines. Barry would come home from work and the entire house would be laminated.

As you can see, they turned out GREAT! We made these for Annie’s cousins for Christmas….and I’m really pleased with how they turned out. They would make a great gift for any child. And actually, I’ve seen this go many places in my head. You could make this gift work for an adult by using a nice photo book and make a set of 4-8 placemats. Pages from an old hymnal would work fabulous too! (I like saying fabulous.) The possibilities are endless! Time for you to laminate something, isn’t it?To repeat: to go the simplest route – chose two pages and get them laminated at Office Depot for $2.99. You can embellish by using paper and stenciling names.Was that natural enough for you?  😉